While climbing the lung-busting, double-decker set of stairs to LABCO's studio, the energy from Sarah Skaggs' new dance filters out into the hallway with perfectly synchronized thumping.

	Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Sarah Skaggs, who splits her time between New York and Pittsburgh performing. Click photo for larger image.

As the dance itself comes into view, it turns into a pulsating tread sometimes punctuated by moon walks. Likewise Skaggs, dark haired and slight of frame, is strong in her choreographic emphasis.

The New York City choreographer has been hanging around Pittsburgh for several years, still navigating the distance between the two cities to keep her Big Apple company on track. LABCO artistic director Gwen Hunter Ritchie has been relentlessly pursuing Skaggs during that time.

		LABCO Dance Program: LABCO presents "Ripe," which includes Sarah Skaggs' "The Women's Dance," Donna Uchizono's "Steel-Eyed Susan" and Hunter Ritchie's "Soul Carrier," a collaboration with composer Efrain Amaya, film/video artist Prajna Paramita Parasher, set designer Susana Amundarain and costume designer Mary Margaret Stewart. Where: Kelly Strayhorn Theater When: Friday and Saturday 8 p.m.; Sunday 2 p.m. Tickets: $13-$15; 412-393-3353 or www.proartstickets.org.

"Sarah is masterful at making work that's accessible to different members of the audience," says Hunter Ritchie. "It's easier to enter, but also very clear. I believe that we can perform it anywhere and I'm glad that we got her at this point in her career."

The pair often joked when Hunter Ritchie repeatedly said, "I want to have you do a piece before you leave." But, as it turns out, Skaggs committed just a month before her life drastically changed.

Skaggs was accepted into a program at Hollins University, under the auspices of the prestigious American Dance Festival, and geared to mid-career returning professionals.

For choreographers like Skaggs, who might want to teach at the university level, the "professional experience is not enough," despite the success that the choreographer might have had.

Born in St. Louis and raised in Virginia, Skaggs earned a degree in theater arts from Greenbriar College. By 1996 she had formed her own company in New York, Sarah Skaggs Dance, where she merged concert dance with social dance and received support from the National Endowment from the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and The Jerome Foundation, among others.

At Hollins University she found herself studying dance history and other topics with former New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff and former head of the American Dance Festival Charles Reinhardt.

"It connected the dots in a new way for me," Skaggs said. "It showed me dance up front and center, a tangible depiction of real life as a choreographer."

There she was able to "study, read, think and write about the choreographic document." It was a mix of creativity versus pedagogy, an issue of craft versus current trends.

Skaggs wasn't alone. She found herself "bumping up against artists" like Paul Taylor Dance Company icon Ruth Andrien -- watching and working -- making mini-improvisations or "big process" pieces.

"We asked why are we doing that and what are we saying," Skaggs reveals, obviously excited by it all.

That experience has spilled into her piece for LABCO, called "The Women's Dance." "This is a whole new change for me -- I'm pairing everything down, a new way of starting over," Skaggs begins. "It made no more sense to me to do extended dance movement -- I wanted to work with so much subtlety. [This dance] is about smooth, slight, nuanced variations."

Now Skaggs has more questions than ever about her work. "What does it mean to make a dance these days?" she asks. "I put myself back in school -- I'm turning my brain inside out.

But still, she's giving herself "the opportunity to really revisit" her art, to push above and beyond the past and into a certifiably uncertain, but nonetheless exciting future.